On Sun, 2011-06-05 at 22:19 +0900, Nobumi Iyanaga wrote:
> In Snow Leopard, creator codes no longer play this role—while they can
> still be assigned by the creating application, they (probably) won’t
> work as you expect them to, especially if you’re a long-time Mac user.
> 
> That’s because Apple has arbitrarily changed the role creator codes
> play in determining what application will open a give document.

I actually think that this is the right move for Apple to have made. In
the past, if you did not own a copy of the program that created a
particular file, you had to jump through unnecessary hoops to get that
file opened with the application YOU use for that filetype (because the
system would simply tell you that it could not find the program that
created the file, and then open a dialog box for you to go digging
through your system to find the application that you use for that
filetype). From what you've described, Apple has now gotten it closer to
right.

My own preference would be if they would adopt something very like the
old Amiga IFF system (Interchange File Format), wherein the filetype
identifier is embedded within the file itself, but the creator is not
identified within the file at all, thus allowing each system to make its
own determination of which program to launch for that filetype, while
still allowing people to name a file as they individually wished. If you
were to look at one of those old IFF files in a hex editor, at the
beginning of the file you would see "FORM" followed by a 4 byte hex code
(for something or other), followed by a 4 character code showing what
type of FORM that file is. For example, a standard Amiga graphics file
would have shown "FORMxxxxILBM", while a music file might show something
like "FORMxxxx8SVX". Even to this day, files saved by PageStream show
"FORMxxxxDOC " (even though PageStream actually started out on the Atari
platform years and years ago, as Publishing Partner; the current
PageStream file format having its genesis with version 3 of PageStream).